The operatic concert paraphrase is one of the most time-bound of musical genres. It's almost exclusively an artifact of the 19th century, an era when keyboard wizards were rife, operas were popular blockbusters, and home stereos didn't exist.

So the new concert paraphrase of "Powder Her Face," introduced by the brilliant composer and pianist Thomas Adès in a fascinating but not always satisfying solo recital in Herbst Theatre on Tuesday, amounts to a wonderfully audacious bit of artistic nostalgia.

It's a sassy, loving and incongruous conjunction of new themes and an utterly dated form, like some sort of postmodernist scrimshaw. And it's the sort of thing that perhaps only Adès could have pulled off.

Kendall Jenner Finally Addressed The Rumors About Her SexualityMarieClaire

Irish Woman Celebrates Saint Patrick's Day With Fiddle Session on Flight to DublinStoryful

The piece is based on Adès' first opera, an exuberant bit of enfant-terrible inventiveness from 1995 about a libidinous duchess in decline. The score includes a wealth of musical styles, from the unabashedly melodic to the pointillistic, and Adès draws on it with glee in his 18-minute opus.

With its rippling accompaniment figures, its fiendish technical demands, its dexterous counterpoint and its abrupt, hyperdramatic rhetoric, this is a concert paraphrase with all the old 19th century trappings firmly in place.

All that's different is the underlying material, and that turns out to be not such a big difference after all. Whether the opera is by Verdi, Bizet or Adès, the pleasures of this kind of exercise remain constant.

To put his own piece in context, Adès offered an illustrious precedent of sorts, Liszt's piano arrangement of the final scene of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." This isn't exactly the same breed of animal, but it amounts to a similar importation of opera into the world of the piano.

Unfortunately, Adès' performance, though technically flawless, was also bizarrely free of any emotional charge. You would never have suspected, listening to his dispassionate, affectless playing, that this was music about love, or death, or anything much grander than a choice of clothing.

And that in turn was a recurrent issue through much of the evening, presented by San Francisco Performances. Adès has a distinctive keyboard sound - precise, somewhat gloomy, heavily pedaled - that he seems to apply to nearly everything he plays.

He began the program with an exquisite account of Book 2 of Janácek's "On the Overgrown Path," and his delicate touch gave these short, gnomic pieces an aura of profundity and grace.

But in Schubert's Allegretto in C Minor, D. 915, and again in Beethoven's Op. 126 Bagatelles, Adès' blurry textures and brusque rhythms made a petulant effect, like the emo remix of these crystalline inventions.

Only in Prokofiev's "Five Sarcasms," Op. 17, did Adès fully wield the power and sharpness of his keyboard technique, and the results were bracing. The encores were the first of Liszt's "Quatre valses oubliées," an excerpt from Prokofiev's "Visions fugitives," Op. 22, No. 11, and François Couperin's "Mysterious Barricades."